At this week’s Graebert Annual Meeting in Berlin, Germany, the global CAD technology company announces a string of new updates and products, including a new ARES Mechanical. The 2D MCAD solution will be based on the ARES Commander 2015 CAD product line and will feature Dassault Systèmes acclaimed CDS (constraint design solver) technology from Spatial Corporation (a Dassault Systèmes company).
ARES Mechanical 2015
ARES Mechanical was created to fulfill the very specific 2D design needs of mechanical engineers seeking high productivity combined with exceptionally intuitive drafting.
MORE: Graebert of Germany announces ARES Commander 2015 2/3D CAD for Mac, Windows and Linux
CDS is a high-performance 2D and 3D constraint-manager for design applications that includes built-in 2D sketching and 3D assembly requirements. This component, industry-tested as part of Dassault® Systèmes (VELIZY-VILLACOUBLAY, France) V5 technology and 3DEXPERIENCE™ platform, will offer ARES Mechanical users powerful features to add 2D geometric and dimensional constraints. This powerful constraints solver is also available for developers using ARES Commander as the engine for their applications.
01 – ARES Mechanical showing the integration of Spatial’s constraint system at work.
ARES Mechanical includes a wide range of MCAD-specific features, including:
- Library of standards-based, ready to use mechanical parts: including bolts and screws, nuts, pins, washers, holes and many others
- Advanced detailing features such as balloons insertion, weld and surface finish symbols and more
- A specific user interface based on interactive and contextual ribbons designed to offer high productivity and to be very easy to learn for most mechanical engineers (especially 3D CAD users who have little experience with DWG-based CAD software such as ARES Commander or Autodesk’ AutoCAD.
“Most mechanical engineers have become accustomed to working with 3D MCAD software such as SOLIDWORKS®, but there is still a compelling need for 2D drawings in MCAD – primarily using the open DWG format. Since the vast majority of these engineers have little experiencewith 2D CAD, we have created a user interface of tools that is designed to be very quickly and intuitively learned by anyone familiar with SOLIDWORKS,” said Wilfried Graebert, CEO and founder of Graebert.
Availability
An alpha version of ARES Mechanical was demonstrated at the Graebert Annual Meeting, in tandem with a strategic overview of Graebert’s plans for supporting the MCAD market. ARES Mechanical is expected to reach beta in 2015. Users interested in becoming a beta tester for ARES Mechanical can go here to sign up for this software.
Architosh Analysis
Although it remains to be fully confirmed we are under the impression that the ARES Mechanical product will first be released for Windows platforms first due to the fact that Spatial Corporation’s CDS (constraint design solver) API technology is currently—unlike their famous ACIS geometry modeling kernel—not available for the Mac OS X platform. In fact, this may be part of the reason why SolidWorks is not available on the Mac platform, though it seems that such an API wouldn’t be all that difficult to port to OS X.
In any case, ARES Mechanical aims to position itself as the go-to 2D drafting CAD tool for mechanical engineers who are, for the most part, already deeply entrenched in the 3D MCAD world such as SolidWorks. In fact, ARES Mechanical looks to be a SolidWorks companion of sorts in lieu of DWG heavy-weight Autodesk AutoCAD.